Prickles and goo: Human rights and spirituality

Abstract

Although there appears to be a growing interest in exploring the crossroads between spirituality and social change, spirituality remains a relatively obscure topic within mainstream international human rights. This article will explore what a more spiritual grounding for human rights might look like and how it might change perspectives and practices from the comparatively conventional and mainstream. Viewing conventional human rights thinking, policy, and practice through the lens of spirituality can facilitate a better and more balanced reading of the human rights corpus and, ultimately, better and more sustainable human rights practice. Although no panacea, spiritual perspectives that enhance a sense of interconnectedness and inclusionary identity may be one way of reinvigorating the human rights project at a time when it is said to be in a state of crisis.

During his public lectures in the 1960s and early 1970s, philosopher Alan Watts (2006) drew a contrast between two different personality types: “prickly” individuals, who favor analytical rigor, the hard, the precise, and the clearly defined straight line; and “gooey” people, who embrace the vague, the soft, the romantic, the mystical, and the wiggly. If prickly people represent “the head,” gooey types are “the heart.” In their mutual disdain, Watts suggested, both sides tend to forget that successfully navigating the world requires an embrace of both perspectives, for real life is neither purely prickly nor completely gooey.

Extending Watts’s metaphor to human rights thinking, policy, and practice, it would seem that what Makau Mutua once called the “conventional” school of human rights (1995–1996: 607) has tended to foreground the prickly dimensions of rights—secularism, individualism, rationalism, and positivism—among other classic enlightenment virtues. Although the concept of human rights is fundamentally multidimensional, bristling with competing and contradictory impulses, the conventional approach to human rights advocacy often foregrounds the legal dimensions of rights (Sharp 2018a). Exemplifying this perspective, large, mainstream NGOs of the Global North (INGOs) often seem to assume the role of a global legal referee whose job it is to hand out red cards to players engaging in violations within the often-brutal scrum of politics. Their advocacy is based on meticulously documented facts, scrupulously anchored in the four squares of international treaty law, and carefully framed in terms of clearly delineated victims, violators, and remedies (Roth 2004: 64). Rigorous documentation is followed by practices of public denunciation—that is, “naming and shaming”—as perpetrators are called to account for their legal violations. Such work often takes on an adversarial, confrontational tone as advocates “speak truth to power.”

Although this prickly model of human rights advocacy has accomplished much, other potentially powerful groundings for change making have received comparatively little attention within the conventional school of human rights. To return to Watts’s metaphor, as compared to the prickly, there has been less inclination on the part of mainstream INGOs to anchor work in the gooey dimensions of making rights real: peace, love, compassion, solidarity, reconciliation, and spirituality. To step outside of the prickles—and the confines of the facts as filtered through categories established in international law—is to risk being accused of rather vague and sloppy “sloganeering” (Roth 2004: 65). In this way, conventional human rights may be said to be somewhat “goophobic.” And yet if this phobia is somewhat understandable, owing to the felt need to compensate for the realpolitik perception that human rights is a hopelessly utopian project, it is also true that the legal referee model of advocacy fails to resonate with many, and that prickly “NGOized” professionalism may not be the best foundation on which to build and sustain a global movement (Lang 2013: 60).

With a view to fostering a better balance between the prickles and the goo of human rights, this article will explore what a more spiritual grounding for human rights might look like and how it might change both perspectives and practices from the comparatively conventional and mainstream. Although the international human rights literature has been largely silent on the topic of spirituality, there are veins to mine within the social work and broader social justice literatures in which concepts of “spiritual activism” (Keating 2008), “mystic activism” (DeYoung 2007), “engaged spirituality” (Falk 2003), and “transformative social change” (Rowe 2016) have been explored.

This article draws on a number of these discussions with a view to sparking conversation within the international human rights community about the need for a wider embrace of more varied advocacy models, including those anchored in spirituality. Spiritual understandings and practices can foster important perspectival shifts in terms of how human rights practitioners understand and relate to their work and to themselves, and have the potential to help activists better cope with stress and burnout over the long term. A stronger spiritual grounding may also inspire provocative and often-neglected conversations: from discussing what activists need to do to successfully advocate for human rights to who they need to be in order to better cultivate the change that is sought (Movement Strategy Center 2017: 50). In this way, spiritual approaches to human rights call on us to contemplate the linkages between inner peace and outer peace, and to ask whether part of trying to change the world must involve trying to change ourselves at the same time. Finally, as a potential link between the secular and the more formally religious, spiritual approaches carry some potential for bridge building between various human rights constituencies.

A more explicit spiritual grounding for human rights work would not, of course, be without controversy. Benjamin Gregg (2016: 3), for example, has argued for a “postmetaphysical” approach to human rights—a stance less likely to foment the types of questions and conversations I am suggesting need to take place. Others see spirituality as akin to privileged and self-indulgent navel gazing, and have argued that spiritual practices such as meditation will do “nothing to change an unjust world” (Moore 2014). In exploring the intersection between human rights and spirituality, I will therefore engage with some of the potential tradeoffs and hard questions raised by bringing spirituality out of the human rights closet.

One large caveat is in order before getting into the thick of things. In discussing a “conventional” or “mainstream” approach to human rights, I am, of course, painting with a very broad brush. One risk is that of recentering certain global actors and approaches as the norm, when in fact the broader human rights landscape includes those who eschew or even actively disagree with such approaches. Moreover, even at fairly established organizations such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, which I would consider to be well within the mainstream, there have been notable changes, innovations, and shifts in recent years, with a younger generation of activists keen to push more senior staff on tactics and theories of change. Nevertheless, even if it can in no way capture the messy reality of the kaleidoscope of practice, the prickly/gooey distinction is a useful heuristic to facilitate discussion of broader trends and choices in human rights framing, emphasis, and strategy.

This article continues in five additional sections. First, I grapple with the meaning of the term “spirituality” and outline the concept as I will use it in this article, involving a combined sense of radical interconnectedness and transcendence. Second, I discuss the broad encounter between spiritual understandings and the ideology of human rights at a conceptual level. Third, I explore the intersection between spirituality and the day-to-day struggles of international human rights work from a more practice-oriented perspective. Fourth, I analyze some of the hard questions and objections that might arise out of an attempt to more explicitly ground human rights work in spirituality. The final section concludes the article.

Spirituality and spiritual practices

Echoing Alan Watts’s concept of goo as something rather amorphous and indistinct, spirituality has no widely agreed upon definition and means different things to different people. The academic literature on spiritualty is growing but thin, owing in part to a kind of “spirit phobia” predicated on the fear of scoffing colleagues and the difficulty of publishing work on the topic (Keating 2008: 55).

Attempts to define spirituality in the literature often involve a contrast with religion, with spirituality being seen as more intimate, personal, idiosyncratic, and experiential, on the one hand, and less formalized, structured, and institutionalized, on the other (e.g., Chile and Simpson 2004: 319). Even with this contrast, the line between them is not always a clean one. Many identify as both spiritual and religious (Lipka and Gecewicz 2017), and many forms of spirituality eclectically draw from a variety of religious traditions. Some have argued that the spiritual impulse is something that predates religion, forming the common mystical core or source code of the varied religions traditions of the world (Keepin 2012). In contrast, van der Veer has contended that the concept of spirituality is a relatively modern creation and cannot be understood apart from the rise of secularism, with which it shares status as a potential alternative to “institutionalized religion in Euro-American modernity” (2009: 1097). In the end, what might be fairly said is that religion and spiritualty are clearly related, sharing a fair degree of overlap, but are nevertheless distinguishable.

The central theme common to many definitions of spirituality is a sense of oneness, interrelatedness, harmony, love, or intimacy with other beings, nature, and the cosmos. Zena Zumeta, for example, defined spirituality as “an awareness of the connectedness of things” (1993: 25). Cyndy Baskin similarly explained indigenous spirituality as an embodiment of “interconnectedness and interrelationship with all life,” with “no separation between the people and the land” (2016: 52). Taken together, Seil Oh and Natalia Sarkisian have referred to such approaches as “holistic spirituality” (2012: 299). From the holistic viewpoint, humans (as well as animals, plants, and so on) cannot be understood as separate from one another or from “nature,” because they are so enmeshed in their environment that viewing them as separate and distinct is as much an intellectual choice and construct as is seeing a particular branch or root as distinct from a tree. As Watts (1973) noted, there are not “organisms” and a separate “environment” but an “organism-environment” that operates as a single field. In contrast to this interconnected, holistic perspective, the typical view in the secular West is that of the individual as a “skin-encapsulated ego,” a being who stands separate and distinct from other humans, from other animals, from nature, and from an indifferent, unintelligent, and mechanical universe—“a vast, pointless gyration of radioactive rocks and gas” in which the separate individual happens to occur (Watts 2006: 228).

In addition to interconnectedness, the concept of spirituality is often associated with a sense of transcendence or of “the sacred.” This might involve a sense of connection to a higher power such as God or some other name for a deity, or perhaps communion with a deeply felt sense of meaning or higher purpose, whether love, justice, peace, nature, or the stillness of the present moment (Boyd 2012: 763). It may also involve a simple reverence, awe, and humility in contemplating that there is something deeply mysterious, wonderful, and weird about the fact that we exist as conscious beings in a universe too vast and strange for us to fully comprehend.

The concept of spirituality is not synonymous with “spiritual practices,” although there is a high degree of overlap. Such practices can take many forms, including meditation, prayer, hatha yoga, tai chi, reading inspirational texts, chanting, and so on. In indigenous shamanic traditions, the guided use of psychedelic plants such as ayahuasca and mushrooms containing psilocybin is considered an important spiritual practice. For many, simply spending time in nature, being surrounded by loved ones, or even surfing and archery may involve a spiritual experience (Herrigel 1953). Finally, community service and social action are also seen by many to be an important form of spiritual practice.

Some forms of spiritual practice—particular forms of meditation and contemplation, for example—have been shown to decrease practitioners' bias against and increase their sense of connection to other individuals, including members of out-groups (Kang, Dovidio, and Gray 2014; Lueke and Gibson 2015; de Freitas and Cikara 2018). Such perceptual shifts may be explained in part by altered activation of the “default mode network” in the brain, a region associated with construction of the sense of self (Schmalzl, Crane-Godreau, and Payne 2014: 3). For regular and long-term meditators, this many help explain some of the “all-is-one” convictions associated with holistic spirituality. Interestingly, studies on the use of psychedelics have also identified altered activation of the default mode network as a key feature of the experience, which may involve a sensation of “ego death” as individual identity momentarily appears to dissolve (Palhano-Fontes, Andrade, Tofoli, Santos, Crippa, Hallak, Ribeiro, and Araujo 2015). Drawing these threads together, I will use the term spirituality to simultaneously invoke a sense of radical interconnectedness and transcendence, of holism and higher purpose, which is often sustained and amplified through regular use of a variety of spiritual practices.

Spirituality and the ideology of human rights

At the broadest level, the relationship between spirituality and social justice is not a new one. As Prior and Quinn (2012: 177) observed, there has long been a connection between spiritual and religious convictions and social action, as seen in the history of civil rights, welfare rights, the labor movement, and various peace movements. Exemplars of this tradition range from Gandhi and Martin Luther King to Thich Nhat Hanh and Thomas Merton (King 2001).

This connection, however, has been less explicit when it comes to the international human rights movement, which, since beginning to take its modern form in the 1970s (Moyn 2012), has given rise to name-brand INGOs such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, together with an elaborate, bureaucratic, and legalistic set of institutions and procedural mechanisms at the United Nations and elsewhere.

Thus, as Stephen Hopgood (2014) suggested, there are differences between the broader “human rights” story, understood in the looser sense of “social justice,” and the narrower “Human Rights” story, whose narrative centralizes particular international treaties, organizations, INGOs, and tactics. In this section, I focus primarily on the encounter between spirituality and “Human Rights”—although much of it will be relevant to rights-based advocacy more generally.¹ I argue that this encounter raises important questions about the role of individualism and identity, together with the marginalization of so-called second- and third-generation rights within conventional human rights.

The question of individualism and identity

Western modernity is associated with deep-seated dualisms characterized by comparative privileging and marginalization: individual/collective, self/other, mind/body, humans/nature, reason/emotion, and so on. Although a number of these dualisms have been encoded into international human rights, perhaps none has been more salient (or at times controversial) than the primacy of the individual, with the individual being understood to hold rights prior to and independent of any particular group membership. One scholar has gone so far as to argue that human rights cannot flourish in any society without widespread “socialization into assertive selfhood” (Gregg 2016: 6–7). Without doubt, rights often imply a community dimension in their exercise, and one can point to a number of canonical rights (e.g., rights to assembly and association) that can facilitate group cohesion. Even so, it must be acknowledged that international human rights generally presuppose a level of individual autonomy and individual self-determination that has not been the norm throughout much of human history and that is still not the norm in much of the world today. This is part of what makes human rights revolutionary.

Historically, these tensions between the individual and collective dimensions of rights have often been presented as a clash of cultural values. For example, the so-called “Asian values” debates of the 1990s pitted a monolithically “communitarian East” against an “individualist West.” For Makau Mutua (1995–1996: 642–643), the tendency to privilege the individual over the group, together with the emphasis on individual rights as compared to the comparative silence as regards the individual’s duties to the community, is taken as evidence of the Western bias of mainstream human rights, proof that conventional human rights cannot truly be universal.

Although the individualism at the heart of human rights will likely continue to account for some of the frictions that rights produce across cultures, a terrain less often explored is that there are religious and spiritual concepts and understandings that present a far more fundamental challenge to the idea of the individual self at the heart of the human rights cosmovision. Thus, for example, Sallie King noted that it can be challenging to reconcile the Buddhist principle of anātman (or no-self), which holds the notion of the individual self to be an illusion, with the concept of human rights, which seems to “presuppose individualism and self-assertion” (2000: 293). An analogous tension arises in the case of the Advaita Vedānta (or nondual) tradition in Hinduism, which holds similar views on the ultimate reality of the individual self (Ram-Prasad 2011: 226). Many modern-day spiritual teachers, from Ram Dass (1971) to Eckhart Tolle (1999), have similarly pointed out that the conventional notion of the individual, narrative self is a construction and, ultimately, a fiction.

Taken literally, such understandings could suggest a fundamental incompatibility between spirituality and human rights. After all, if we are all one and the individual self is an illusion, then perhaps human rights discourse is just another means of feeding the illusion of separation and duality. As Sallie King noted, however, human rights require only “a functional person, not an ultimately real human self” (2009: 138). Thus, whatever the ultimate metaphysical truth, a more moderate view would be to understand holistic spirituality as posing a legitimate challenge to readings of the human rights corpus that would overly emphasize atomistic individualism, and an invitation to develop a nuanced view when it comes to understanding the relationship between the individual and the community and between rights and duties involving mutual interdependence and pervasive interconnectedness. From this more holistic, nondual perspective, “society and the person are interactive; they are mutually constructive” (King 2000: 297). As expressed by the Southern African concept of ubuntu: “I am because we are.”

It follows that individual rights and group rights, and the inner peace of the individual and the outer peace of the world around us, cannot be separated or liberated in a piecemeal fashion. One can see elements of this view in Eleanor Roosevelt’s (1958) famous speech about where human rights begin: “in small places, close to home—so close that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world,” including neighborhoods and schools. Without attentiveness to these small places, Roosevelt warned, “we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world.”

Ultimately, such a spiritual perspective lays the predicate for a more intimate, relational view of human rights as an ongoing dialogue between self and other, and between the individual and the community, in which the key props and protagonists of the mainstream human rights story—the machinery of the state, the United Nations, the lawyers, the experts, the treaties, the INGOs—become less central. At the same time, such a perspective lends support to those who would look to the machinery of international human rights in an effort to foster a better balance between the individual and communitarian dimensions of rights in theory, policy, and practice.

Related to the question of individualism, human rights discourse plays a complex role vis-à-vis the conceptualization of both individual and group identity. It contains centripetal dimensions that push us inward toward a core of common identity, and centrifugal elements that push us outward in emphasizing elements of difference. Thus, on the one hand, human rights instruments such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights are permeated with rhetoric of unity and homogenization: shared humanity, common dignity, universality, and equal protection. On the other hand, those same instruments also rely on and reify social constructions and categories that have historically been used to divide and to oppress: race, color, gender, language, religion, national origin, and so on.

The right balance between these two tendencies has, at times, sparked controversy. Mark Lilla (2017), for example, warned that a fixation on viewing the world through the singular lens of racial and other identities of difference can exacerbate fragmentation in contemporary society, and argued for the use of concepts and categories that emphasize commonality, shared traits, and duties to society. This perspective is supported by recent psychological research suggesting that emphasizing cultural and ethnic differences in the name of multicultural sensitivity can actually increase race essentialism (Wilson, Apfelbaum, and Good 2019). In contrast, there has been a competing tendency among some activists to use concepts like “cultural appropriation” to police and reinforce the boundaries of difference, insisting that members of certain racial and ethnic groups should exercise extreme caution around—if not avoid altogether—certain hairstyles, dress, food, art, and even spiritual practices such as yoga and meditation, lest they “colonize” that which is not theirs (e.g., Muddagouni 2016).²

A spiritual perspective of radical interconnectedness would seem to challenge approaches to human rights and social justice that overemphasize the more centrifugal tendencies of human rights rhetoric, and to encourage what AnaLouise Keating called “inclusionary models of identity formation” (2008: 64). As Angel Kyodo Williams wrote in Being Black: Zen and the Art of Living with Fearlessness and Grace, there is a “freedom spot” in our brains where we are “completely free” of our histories and our stories (2000: 174). Similarly, without rejecting conventional forms of identity formation—whether based on race, gender, or sexual orientation—poet and “spiritual activist” Gloria Anzaldúa maintained “that these conventional categories are too restrictive and cannot adequately define us” (Keating 2008: 62).

Thus, without denying the relevance of conventional forms of identity to the sense of self and as a vector for the perpetuation of human rights abuses, what might therefore be hoped is that we come to hold our identities more lightly—out of a sense of joy, play, and masquerade—rather than tightly clinging to them as the fundamental reality of “who we really are.” Although various forms of trauma—ongoing, historic, intergenerational, and chosen—play a complex role in the process of individual and group identity formation (Volkan 2001), spiritual practices may offer pathways for healing and for deconstruction of limited and limiting identity narratives. Keeping such perspectives in mind, we are perhaps less likely to get lost in our social roles and identities in ways that lead to continuously filtering others’ statements and actions through an identity-based interpretative matrix as often seems to be the case in highly politically polarized contexts.

Over the longer term, Steven Hick and Charles Furlotte argued, spiritual perspectives that emphasize interconnectedness encourage identification with others, emphasizing “com-passion or ‘being with,’ because we are not separate from others” (2009: 15). Such spiritual perspectives can be combined with spiritual practices such as meditation, which can decrease the reactivity and automaticity of our judgements toward others, while helping to bring awareness to our own lingering racist and sexist conditioning.

The question of the marginalization of second- and third-generation rights

Writing in the late 1970s, Karel Vasak articulated the problematic but enduring concept of “generations” of human rights (1977: 29) The “first generation” includes civil and political rights, such as freedom of expression and the right to be free from torture, as reflected in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (United Nations 1966a). The “second generation” includes economic and social rights, such as rights to education and health, as reflected the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (United Nations 1966b). Although not as well established under international law as the first two generations, Vasak also identified an emerging “third generation” of rights, including rights to peace, development, and a healthy environment (1984: 837). Each generation can be associated, Vasak observed, with the motto of the French Republic—namely, liberté, egalité, and fraternité, or freedom, equality, and solidarity (1984: 837).

Some have objected to this generational terminology on the grounds that it represents a gross oversimplification and because it suggests a hierarchy of rights. Nevertheless, the hierarchical terminology accurately reflects the comparative marginalization of second- and third-generation rights within mainstream human rights discourse and practice.³ Some of this can be attributed to historical origins and associations. Vasak noted that, whereas first-generation rights might be historically associated with bourgeois revolutions in France and the United States, the second generation is linked to the Russian Revolution of 1917, and the third with colonial emancipatory struggles of the mid-twentieth century (1984: 837). It is fair to say that the lingering association with communism and the Global South has not enhanced the legitimacy of second- and third-generation rights in much of the Global North. Beyond these associations, however, there is also the question of congruity with deep-seated ideology. That is, although all generations of rights have both individual and collective dimensions, most first-generation rights can be more easily accommodated by a Western and neoliberal sense of atomized individualism than those of the second and third generations, which would seem to require a higher degree of collective effort and solidarity for successful realization.

As seen from a spiritual perspective of interconnectedness, however, hard and easy distinctions between the individual and collective—between the “hands-off” or negative dimensions of rights and the “hands-on” or positive dimensions of rights—are themselves part of the problem. Both the courthouses so central to many first-generation rights and the schoolhouses associated with the second generation require substantial investment and effort from taxpayers, state actors, and communities to function as they should. Thus, the truth is that every generation of rights requires a degree of solidarity, of identification with others, and of collective effort to be successfully realized. However, without the infusion of a more holistic perspective, rights thinking and rhetoric can easily lend themselves to a cranky libertarianism that allows one to imagine that all that is necessary for the fulfilment of rights is for state actors to keep their hands off our bodies and our pocketbooks.

A nondual or interconnected spiritual perspective that rejects easy distinctions between self and other and between self and the world also lays a useful predicate for third-generation environmental rights. To return to Alan Watts (1973), we are all part of a collective and unfolding “organism-environment” process. Humans cannot be separated from animals or from the environment any more than a wave can be separated from the ocean. We are the ecosystem and the ecosystem is us. Even if my personal civil and political rights are respected, I will never be truly free in a world rife with radical poverty and inequality, economic violence, global warming, and ecological collapse. In these and other ways, a more spiritual perspective on human rights would be an important step in beginning to address the marginalization of second- and third-generation rights within mainstream discourse and practice, and of creating a mutually supportive ecosystem of rights on a planetary level.

Spirituality and human rights practice

With this encounter between spirituality and the ideology of human rights as a backdrop, in this section I turn to the intersection between spirituality and human rights practice. Drawing on some of my own experience doing human rights documentation work in West Africa, I argue that spiritual practices and understandings can help to foster important perspectival shifts in terms of how human rights practitioners understand the broader purpose and nature of the work, including their role therein; how they relate to the victims and perpetrators with whom they are often called upon to engage; and how they cope with stress and burnout over the long term. I will also argue that bringing a spiritual perspective to human rights work carries with it some potential for bridge-building between various human rights constituencies.

The nature of the work

In training activists in North America and across sub-Saharan Africa, I have always been keen to try to understand the motivations that draw people to do human rights work. Individuals are, of course, complex, and answers to my questions have been far from monolithic. That said, among other things, those conversations have often centered on a sincere desire to make the world a better place, coupled with an abiding sense of frustration and indignation at the injustices that continue to pervade it. This “indignation impulse” as a spur to action has a long lineage, and some even understand anger as “the primordial emotion of justice” (Sikkink 2017: 21). One early-twentieth-century activist who helped to pioneer the model that would become modern transnational human rights advocacy has been described as having an innate and “prodigious capacity for indignation” analogous to the inborn talent of a musical prodigy, and an advocacy style that “combined controlled fury with meticulous accuracy” (Hochschild 1999: 187). Today, the indignation impulse has come to undergird a style of human rights advocacy that some see as adversarial and confrontational, premised on cultivating and mobilizing public outrage, naming and shaming, and speaking truth to power. This same impulse is reflected in the language of battle activists use when they describe their work: fighting for the cause, marshalling resources, employing tactical strategies, and so on (Sheridan 2012: 194). Some activists even fear that, without their anger, they will lose motivation to work for change (Tworkov 2001).

When examined closely, the indignation impulse reveals a theory of change that focuses on the need to change the world that surrounds and is separate from the activist—one in which outer peace is understood as something that can be distinguished from inner peace. However, if one takes the spiritual perspective of radical interconnectedness seriously—a perspective that challenges easy distinctions between inner and outer, between self and other, and between self and the world—strategies that rely on the cultivation of indignation become far less straightforward as ideal vehicles for social change.

In his writings and public lectures, spiritual teacher Ram Dass has discussed the irony and ambivalence he has felt when observing the ambient level of anger of those attending peace rallies (2013). In such situations, he noted, there is a danger that bringing our own anger to the event and helping to cultivate it in others only leads to that much more anger in the world, and not to more peace, justice, and love. Anger also seems to presuppose a sharp separation between self and other—one in which I am clearly right and the other is clearly wrong—that can lead to a type of self-righteousness and moral smugness that does more to strengthen the individual ego and contribute to polarization than to change others for the better. This makes cultivating compassion (or “feeling with”) and, ultimately, understanding what is driving the other to engage in objectionable behavior more challenging. Although this can be easy to see at an intellectual level and from a distance, it is challenging to maintain equanimity and extend compassion in the flush of real-life human rights dramas. In such situations, the cultivation (through spiritual practice) of a high degree of presence and a lack of reactivity and rush to judgment can be helpful.

A spiritual grounding for human rights advocacy therefore calls on us to ask not just what activists may need to do to successfully advocate for human rights but also who they need to be and what qualities they need to embody in order to better cultivate the change that is sought (Movement Strategy Center 2017: 50). This is, of course, not a new idea; indeed, Gandhi (1913–1914) is widely known to have emphasized that personal and social transformation are inseparably linked. However, thus far, the world of conventional human rights has tended to answer the who-do-we-need-to-be question by ramping up levels of professionalization and credentialization—for example, hiring lawyers trained in Ivy League schools—and by attempting to increase the diversity of staff and office locations in an attempt to shake off the impression that conventional human rights is a Western project (Hopgood 2014: 112–114). Although these are important efforts, they continue to reflect an emphasis on the “outer” dimension of change making: professional pedigree, racial identity, national identity, geographic location, and so on.

To be clear, bringing the “inner” dimensions of change making away from the periphery of conventional human rights where they now sit does not mean that the human rights activist must suddenly choose a meditation retreat instead of working on an advocacy project, or that NGOs should offer yoga classes to staff members rather than trying to diversify and professionalize them. Rather, a spiritual perspective involves increased attentiveness to the intimate connections between inner and outer throughout the course of our human rights work.

Indeed, in the karma yoga tradition within Hinduism, service to others is itself seen as a vehicle for inner transformation, a way of sanding down the personal ego and sense of self that tends to “otherize” fellow human beings. Thus, as Laura Kittel (2011: 907–909) has noted, a holistic approach that focuses simultaneously on the need to change the social structures that drive abuses together with the inner sources—be they greed, hatred, anger, or delusion—is to take an integrated, root causes approach to social change.

When approached from a spiritual perspective, the day-to-day practice of human rights work provides ample opportunities for cultivating presence, patience, compassion, understanding, and love—both within ourselves and within others—just as it can be used to amplify anger, ego, and a sharp sense of separation that makes identification with the other more difficult. Such moments occur every time one interacts with a victim, a perpetrator, a colleague, or a member of the public. Although approaching human rights work with a degree of presence, patience, compassion, and love certainly does not guarantee successful advocacy outcomes, neither is failing to focus on using the work to develop these qualities likely to enhance one’s prospects.

In saying that activists should pay attention to the connections between inner and outer dimensions of social change, I do not mean to suggest one must suddenly repress a natural indignation at widespread injustice or ignore the ways in which it can help to incite action. At the same time, given the role that spiritual practices such as meditation can play in reducing automaticity of response and regression to default habits and pathways, they may, with time, help to cultivate more flexible thinking, opening us up to more creative work and changing the longer-term nature of the way we frame problems and conceptualize responses (Rowe 2016).

For example, an emphasis on love rather than indignation-based approaches to human rights advocacy might open the door to strategies that have been comparatively marginalized within conventional human rights: community education, constituency building, dialogue and listening practices, reconciliation work, and the promotion of community resilience and development, among other things. Such approaches raise hard questions about distinctions between what it means to do “human rights advocacy” as opposed to “conflict resolution,” and point to the need to diversify the conventional human rights “toolbox.” In doing so, human rights activists might come to strike a better balance between the need for shining a light on suffering and violence through public confrontation and condemnation, on the one hand, and the need to foster narratives of progress, resilience, and hope, on the other (Sharp 2019). In this way, insofar as they help to shake us out of “a particular vision of ends and means,” spiritual practices and insights can be quite subversive (Sheridan 2012: 205).

If spiritual perspectives help to loosen up some thinking and practice, this may also create possibilities for more varied alliances and partnerships. At a thematic level, the examples provided above involving an embrace of community education and reconciliation work, for example, may bring human rights and peacebuilding organizations into closer conversation and collaboration. Beyond this, however, spiritual approaches to human rights may serve as a potential link between the secular temple of conventional human rights and the vast majority of the world’s people, who tend to be more formally religious. William Keepin (2012), for example, has promoted the concept of “interspirituality” as the core and lingua franca of the world’s varied religious traditions, much in the same way that conventional human rights purports to represent a transcivilizational and transcultural ethical code. Writing nearly 70 years earlier, Aldous Huxley similarly identified deep and striking spiritual patterns across religious traditions he called “the perennial philosophy” (1944).

Although such perspectives are unlikely to provide a door to fundamentalist hardliners such as Boko Haram, I have found that my own spiritual beliefs and practices have provided points of commonality, understanding, and vocabulary when interacting with priests, imams, and indigenous spiritual practitioners in the course of doing human rights work in West Africa. This bridge building provided access to critical interviews for human rights documentation work and was instrumental in inspiring unconventional advocacy alliances.

Finally, spiritual perspectives and practices have important implications for the ways in which human rights practitioners interact with both victims and perpetrators during the course of their work. In the hundreds of field interviews I have conducted, I have found that my most successful were those to which I brought a high degree of mindful presence—that is, a compassionate, nonjudgmental, and singular focus on the individual being interviewed that made them feel fully heard and valued. Conversely, the worst interviews were those in which I was distracted, hurried, or made the individual feel like he or she was part of an information extraction exercise. Although good methodological training is certainly helpful in this regard, it is difficult not to shut down and adopt a self-protective, clinical demeanor when doing hundreds of interviews involving grotesque brutality. Using mindfulness techniques involving witnessing emotional reactivity while trying to remain fully present can be be a useful adjunct to methodological training.

Getting it right is particularly challenging for interviews with perpetrators, who may obfuscate or even be openly hostile, and who are keen to pick up on any element of self-righteousness, disdain, anger, or judgment when being questioned. Bringing a degree of mindful presence to these interviews is helpful in keeping emotions and reactivity in check, and in approaching the individuals with a spirit of curiosity and sympathy that connects with the being behind the particular roles they are playing and choices they have made. One does not carry out unspeakable acts without a great degree of suffering being involved, and this is often palpable below the surface of such interviews. A spiritual perspective of radical interconnectedness that refuses easy distinctions between self and other means that perpetrators are not “them” but part of “us,” and this understanding makes it easier to be “hard on issues” while “soft on the people” (Satyana Institute 2016). As Donal Dorr (2009) has noted, a spirituality of human rights involves moving from “respect” for others to “reverence.” This applies to everyone: victims and perpetrators, those on “our side” and those otherwise inclined.

Stress and burnout

“Facing suffering continually is no small task” (Ram Dass and Gorman 1985), and yet doing human rights work almost invariably involves focusing on some of the darkest sides of humanity and a degree of intimacy with the details of atrocity that few who do not work on issues such as genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes can fully appreciate. Given the nature of the work, it seems almost inevitable that it will take a heavy toll on activists and, indeed, over time human rights work can lead to stress, depression, burnout, and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD; see Chen and Gorski 2015).

Despite this, human rights organizations have, in general, done a poor job of responding to the mental health and well-being of staff (Satterthwaite, Knuckey, Sawhney, Wightman, Bagrodia, and Brown 2019). Activists themselves have tended to neglect the need for self-care, owing in part to a culture of martyrdom and self-sacrifice. After all, when surrounded by those suffering far worse than you, taking time for “self-care” can seem like so much self-indulgence. Without self-care, however, activists may no longer be emotionally healthy enough to deal with conflict and suffering constructively (Simon 2018). One welcome trend is a growing interest in helping activists to develop psychological and emotional resilience (Knuckey, Satterthwaite, and Brown 2018), a movement pioneered by innovative organizations around the world.

Although more conventional medical and psychological strategies and treatment have a critical role to play, it is also important to consider the role of spiritual concepts and practices in helping activists to cope. Much has been written about the efficacy of meditation practices to reduce stress and facilitate emotional regulation; indeed, there is now a booming industry that promotes the benefits of “mindfulness-based stress reduction” as popularized by John Kabat-Zinn. Research suggests that higher levels of mindfulness are associated with reduced levels of mental health problems following exposure to trauma (Thompson, Arnkoff, and Glass 2011: 220–222). There are also strong suggestions that meditation and other contemplative practices increase resilience more generally (Sivilli and Pace 2014).

In addition to such practices, some have emphasized the importance of spiritual understandings for providing conceptual frameworks that are helpful for coping with stress and burnout over the longer term. This includes the need to anchor one’s work in a transcendent sense of higher purpose that allows one to work through exposure to stress and trauma. Although human rights work itself might seem sufficient in this regard, needing no higher purpose beyond itself, the lack of day-to-day progress many human rights workers experience, coupled with the urgency many feel due to a heightened awareness of injustice, can give the work a feeling of futility that leads to frustration, a sense of failure, and burnout (Chen and Gorski 2015). However, if such work is undertaken not as a means to a destination but as part of a longer-term spiritual journey, then both success and failure become grist for the spiritual mill, a means of cultivating patience, humility, and surrender to a present moment that we cannot hope to steer.

As Ram Dass and Paul Gorman have noted, burnout arises in part out of a fantasy that we can shape outcomes over which we do not ultimately have control, arising from the individual ego’s need to feel that it is running the show (1985: 186). From this perspective, it is therefore the individual ego that burns out—the one that somewhat presumptuously says “I did that” or “I failed to accomplish that”—when, in reality, human rights outcomes depend on an impossibly complex number of variables. The solution, Ram Dass and Gorman argued, is to give full effort to the cause, but to retain humility, surrendering—to a higher power, to the present moment, to the cosmos—when it comes to the actual outcome (1985). In other words, focus on the inputs and accept that the outputs are beyond our control. Over time the frictions generated out of this inner struggle may lead to a gradual erosion of the individual ego and the sense of separation and alienation from others, from nature, and from the world. Taken together, such framings may be helpful in mitigating the ego-driven perfectionism that is associated with higher rates of burnout and PTSD and are consistent with research suggesting that the ability to engage in cogitative reappraisal of negative and difficult experiences is associated with enhanced resilience (Knuckey et al. 2018: 311–313).

Related to this problem of ego-driven advocacy, other writers have emphasized the corrosiveness and unsustainability of anger as a ground for social action and identified it as a contributing factor when it comes to burnout (Todd 2009; Sheridan 2012; Chen and Gorski 2015). Anger represents a conflict relationship with the present moment that sits in tension with both inner and outer peace. From a spiritual perspective, the paradox, therefore, is that we have to surrender to and accept the present moment in order to try to change the future with a degree of equanimity compatible with long-term self-care. Needless to say, all of this is easier said than done, and it illustrates one of the tensions between human rights, which tend to be utopian and future oriented, and spirituality, which tends to emphasize the need to “be here now.” However, the difficulty is also one of the reasons why social action can be an arduous but rewarding vehicle for spiritual practice and personal growth. It is, after all, easy to feel “mindful” while on a meditation retreat; but doing so in the context of stressful and bitterly contested human rights work requires serious spiritual heavy lifting.

Objections and hard questions

With the increasing popularity of spiritual practices such as mindfulness meditation, together with the growing number individuals who identify as “spiritual but not religious” (Lipka and Gecewicz 2017), a number of concerns have been raised that are worth considering in attempting to assess the potential for a more spiritual grounding for human rights.

One such concern is that a focus on spirituality and spiritual practices risks devolving into solipsism, narcissism, and withdrawal, with excessive focus on self-healing and self-improvement rather than on engagement in social justice causes, volunteerism, and so on (Wink, Dillon, and Fay 2005). Some spiritual circles—such as those associated with “neo-advaita,” which are inspired by Hindu beliefs that the world is an illusion—may also be prone to a sort of otherworldly indifference to human suffering (Lucas 2014: 110). After all, if the world is an illusion, why try to change it? Such tendencies could suggest a fundamental tension between spirituality and human rights activism.

Although these are concerns worth keeping in mind, empirical work by Oh and Sarkisian (2012) suggested that high levels of holistic spiritualty are positively associated with altruistic behaviors, participation in voluntary associations, and activities directed at social transformation. It is worth noting, however, that these findings do not appear to extend to those engaged in spiritual practices for purely therapeutic reasons such as stress reduction.

A second concern arising out of the rise in popularity of spiritual practices such as mindfulness meditation is that such practices have been stripped of their original ethical groundings in Buddhist teaching and are, in effect, being used to grease the skids of neoliberalism by helping corporate workers reduce stress and thereby increase performance. Critics have called this “McMindfulness” (Purser 2019). One could theoretically extend this concern to a human rights organization that fostered a culture of mindfulness meditation and yoga in the name of employee wellness on the grounds that it was simply trying to squeeze a few more years out of employees bordering on burnout.

Drawing the concerns about spiritual quiescence and McMindfulness together, what seems clear is that, whereas denatured spiritual practices are useful for therapeutic purposes in reducing anxiety, depression, and stress (Khoury, Lecomte, Fortin, Masse, Therien, Bourchard, Chapleau, Paquin, and Hofmann 2013), a spiritual grounding for human rights should also involve the integration of spiritual concepts and understandings such as those associated with radical interconnectedness, transcendence, and service to others as a spiritual path. Reflecting on the historical lineage and normative grounding of spiritual practices may prove useful in this regard.

A more fundamental objection to building linkages between spiritualty and human rights might seem to be found in Benjamin Gregg’s argument that human rights need to move away from the “metaphysical,” “otherworldly,” and “theological foundations” of the past if they are to secure a place in the future (2016: 2). My argument, however, is not that human rights are not socially constructed, as Gregg asserts, or that they must be grounded in spiritual or religious concepts to remain coherent, as others have suggested (Perry 2007). Rather, viewing conventional human rights through the lens of spirituality can facilitate a better and more balanced understanding of the human rights corpus and, ultimately, better and more sustainable human rights practice. Although the human rights corpus certainly contains secular humanist ideals that would seem to do much of the same work as spiritual perspectives such as radical interconnectedness—we are all human beings with rights and dignity, after all—this is not necessarily the same as being made to feel subjectively and experientially that we are all connected as some spiritual practices can do. Working with this felt experience of solidarity, interconnectedness, and inclusionary identity may be one way of reinvigorating the human rights project at a time when it is said to be in a state of crisis and in which atavistic projects of nationalism, fundamentalism, and authoritarian populism are on the rise (Hopgood 2014).

It is also worth noting that many of the spiritual understandings discussed in this article, such as the illusory nature of the individual self and the perspective of radical interconnectedness, do not require any particular metaphysical beliefs and can be arrived at through neuroscientific study (Harris 2014). To see the unity and interconnectedness of life, for example, requires no particular belief in God or an afterlife, but only a shift in perspective. Neither does a spiritual perspective require that one wear meditation beads, burn incense, greet others with a softly whispered namaste, or other outward trappings of modern-day spiritualty in the Global North. Indeed, in some traditions the spiritual ideal is one of complete outward ordinariness, with full investment and immersion in the day-to-day here and now. Finally, if spiritual concepts seem imprecise and metaphysical, it should be remembered that all concepts—whether arising out of international law, critical theory, or spirituality—are but constructs that exist nowhere outside of our imaginations.

Conclusion

There appears to be a small but growing interest in exploring the crossroads between spirituality and social change. Author and news anchor Van Jones has welcomed a “convergence between spiritual people becoming more active and activist people becoming more spiritual” (Simon 2018). Rowe (2016) has observed a growing number of organizations working at “the fold between subjective and social change.” Even so, the intersection of spirituality and change-making remains an obscure (if not taboo) topic within both mainstream academic and conventional human rights circles. As Baskin (2016) has noted, it is often strangely easier in such milieux to discuss sexual abuse than it is to talk about intimate personal spiritual beliefs. That is unfortunate, because spiritual perspectives have much to contribute to the debates and dilemmas of human rights ideology and practice.

Although the prickly dimensions of human rights will remain important to the struggle for social change going forward, it is far from obvious that human rights can be best advanced in the current moment by pushing the gooier dimensions of rights—including spirituality—to the margins. Such perspectives can easily coexist alongside if not serve to strengthen other human rights lenses, be they religious or secular, under the big tent of human rights pluralism.

Acknowledgments

For valuable discussions and comments on previous drafts, my thanks go to Melanie Adrian, Sarah Knuckey, Michael Perry, Laura Webber, and several anonymous reviewers.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Dustin N. Sharp

Dustin N. Sharp is an associate professor at the Kroc School of Peace Studies at the University of San Diego, specializing in international human rights and transitional justice. His published works include Re-Thinking Transitional Justice for the 21^st Century: Beyond the End of History (Cambridge University Press, 2018), and articles in Human Rights Quarterly, Harvard Human Rights Journal, Journal of Human Rights Practice, and International Journal of Transitional Justice. He has extensive experience living and working in Sub-Saharan Africa, and was formerly a researcher for Human Rights Watch, covering Francophone West Africa. He holds a JD from Harvard Law School and a PhD in law from Leiden University.

Notes

1 I refer to “conventional” or “mainstream” human rights in lieu of Hopgood’s use of capitalization.

2 I would distinguish these forms of “appropriation” from acts of intentional cultural derision or ideas taken without payment or credit.

3 This is not to ignore the important normative headway that second- and third-generation rights have made in recent decades. Indeed, an increasing number of international treaties reflect a commitment to economic and social rights, and significant historic and ongoing efforts to strengthen third-generation rights to development and to a healthy environment are well documented (Sharp 2018b). Even with this important progress, however, it would be difficult to argue that second- and third-generation rights have thus far managed to achieve equal footing with those of the first generation.